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Wednesday, January 04, 2012

The debate over religion in the West is dominated by Christians, on the one side, and atheists or secularists, on the other, with some input from New Agers. Atheist values are often conflated with those of secular humanism, the dominent atheist "religion" in the democratic world. Secularists also often glibly take a triumphalist posture: "Christianity is dying," they say, pointing to slight downward trends in church-going or faith in God in America, and a larger slides in Europe. (Seldom, however, recalling how often Christianity has ebbed and flowed in the West before.)

What is often forgotten is that most atheists over the past century have not been secular humanists, but Marxists and communists. This may even have been true in Western countries, in some of which (such as Italy and France) communist parties polled 20 or 30% of the electorate during the 1970s.

Today, about two thirds of the people in China deny holding any religious beliefs. This means that MOST "unbelievers" in the world probably live in China, including most atheists.

Over three weeks in October through December, I surveyed about 124 Mainland Chinese intellectuals. (Most in Mainland China, but including 19 near the University of Washington in Seattle.) I learned many interesting things. What I would like to share in this post is what I learned about the precarious position of atheism in modern China.

More than 70 respondents were college students at a major university in northern China. About a dozen other college students answered my survey in other cities. Most of the other respondents had graduated from college, in some cases with MA or Phd degrees. Some were themselves college teachers, including in an Institute of Marxist Studies.

I was curious to see what undergraduates and graduates would say, first about Marxism, then about atheism. Here are some results:

* 23 out of 81 undergraduates who answered the survey as a whole defined their faith as "Marxism." The most popular alternatives were (collectively) "unsure" (15), "other" (9), and "agnosticism" (6), for 30 total votes, various forms of Buddhism (8), Confucianism (8), Lao-Zhuang thought (5), Daoist religion (4), Christian (3), and Islam (1 -- a Uighur from the Northwest). So about 42% of those who defined their faith, chose Marxism.

* Asked what they thought about God, the most common answer was that He does not exist (47), followed by the Pantheistic belief that He is in all things (12), "Other" (12; in practice this often means something like "God is a belief in the heart," monolatry (4), monotheism (4), and polytheism (3). So of those who gave a clear answer, about 67% opted for atheism.

* Among older intellectuals who had already graduated from college, only 7 self-identified as Marxists. The Agnostic (6)/ Unsure (9) / Other (1) block in this case more than doubled the number of Marxists (16), followed by Confucianists (6), Buddhists (5), Christians (5), Lao-Zhuang thinkers (3), Daoist religion (2), and 1 Muslim. So only about 24% of graduates who identified with a belief system, chose Marxism.

So the percent of intellectuals who denied that God exists, seemed to be more than cut in half, after graduation.

This is admittedly a small poll, and skewed geographically and by other variables. For one thing, I found that Christian students at the university where I conducted this survey were being suppressed. We cannot automatically assume a larger survey of Chinese intellectuals would follow these figures too closely.

From prior experience surveying Chinese intellectuals, however, I believe this at least roughly reflects the general trend.

One of the Christian graduates, from Mao Zedong's home county, told me she had only become a Christian after graduation. This seems to be a fairly common pattern, evidently not just to Christianity, but to greater openness towards religious beliefs.

Should Christians in America panic because some of our young people lose their faith when they go to college? Does this spell doom for the Christian faith, as many skeptics fervently hope?

Should atheists in China likewise panic at the flight from atheism after graduation?

Here I return to my core conviction about the future: God alone knows what will happen next. Perhaps in both countries, a secularist college education will seem at first to "catch," but will ultimately prove ephemeral, as graduates move out into the "real world" and seek to make their ways in it.

5 comments:

"What is often forgotten is that most atheists over the past century have not been secular humanists, but Marxists and communists."

It may be true that most atheists over the past century were not secular humanists, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to substantiate that they were "Marxists and communists".

While the toltalitarian and authoritarian regimes in many communist countries did indeed strive to surpress religion, that is hardly the same thing as actually changing people's beliefs. Surely you don't think that just because a person may be forbidden from publicly expressing their beliefs that they cease to have those beliefs? Do you really imagine that when Catholicism was surpressed under Elizabeth I all the Catholics in England magically became Protestants?

Or imagine the equally bizarre situation of all Russian Catholics suddenly becoming atheists, simply because their government banned the Orthodox church?

I leave aside the fact that not everyone living in a communist country is necessarily a member of the Party, regardless of their personal religious beliefs or lack thereof.

23 out of 81 undergraduates who answered the survey as a whole defined their faith as "Marxism." "

I am very interested in how this question was framed. Did you simply ask "what is your faith?" or "what is your religious belief?"

Or did you load the question by giving a list of "religious faiths" that included non-religious items like "Marxism" and "atheism"?

In any event, I certainly don see that there's anything for American Christians to panic about. America has become the most overtly religious country in the western world, and shows little sign of changing anytime soon. It is American atheists who should be (and who are) distressed.

Dr. H: Sometimes you make me think you missed the entire 20th Century. Of course atheism changed peoples' beliefs! Do you really think I'd get the same results in Taiwan?

No, I wouldn't. How do I know? I did surveys there, too.

And under Mao, Stalin, Kim, and Pol Pott, communism changed beliefs far MORE than in modern China.

This is hardly just about "publicly expressing beliefs." It is about pervasive anti-religious propaganda, fines, losing jobs, being imprisoned and not infrequently killed. If you kill enough believers, eventually that changes the ratio of unbelievers to believers.

Some of these, obviously, are theistic, others are not. In the context of modern China, I think it's a fair set of choices.

I don't see why reasonable-minded atheists should be distressed, even if Christianity is doing well in the US; obviously, Christianity hasn't prevented America from achieving its past glories. You should worry more about the National Debt.

Dr. H: Sometimes you make me think you missed the entire 20th Century.

Would that I could have...

Of course atheism changed peoples' beliefs!

That was neither what you said, nor what I was responding to. You implied that communism was causing people to become atheists. I don't think you can support that assertion in any significant way. The closest you are going to be able to come is to show that the governments in some countries which also happened to have a comunist economic system were sometimes able to forcefully compel people to bahave as if they were athists -- for self-preservation, if no other reason.

If you kill enough believers, eventually that changes the ratio of unbelievers to believers.

Granted. But eliminating believers is hardly the same thing as converting believers to unbelief.

And if believers refrained from public expression of thier belief, how would those in a position to oppress them know that they were believers?

The precise wording of my question was as follows: "下面哪一项最适合描绘您的信仰？“

LOL. Touche. :)

"Which of the following choices best describes your faith / beliefs?"

So the question was loaded. And potentially biased by the order in which you presented the choices.

Would have been far more objective had you asked an open-ended question like "please briefly describe your basic religious belief(s)".

I'm willing to wager that if I were to present your question to people on the stret here, and include in your list choices like "capitalism," "vegetarianism," and "reformed Bokononism" I would get non-zero responses to all three, and likely significant number of positives to the first two.

"I don't see why reasonable-minded atheists should be distressed, even if Christianity is doing well in the US; obviously, Christianity hasn't prevented America from achieving its past glories. You should worry more about the National Debt.

I am concrened about the debt (among other things). That's why it distresses me that the individuals to which we give the most power to deal with such things so frequently profess to believe in mythological beings and magic.

Dr. H: I refer you again to the blog. I found that college students in China were highly likely to say they disbelieve in God, though this often changed later. Are you really going to assert that atheistic teaching had no effect on that? Or do you think the students were just lying to me?

The contrast with Taiwan is sharp. Whereas two thirds of Chinese deny having a religion, many Taiwanese seem to have two or three. Do you suppose it is just a coincidence that people educated in communist countries tend to deny having religions? Or are they all deceiving us?

If propaganda is as ineffectual as you seem to think, why do you fret so much about the danger of government?

I wouldn't describe my question as "loaded." The choices were a mix of skeptical and "religious" answers; people were given lots of options, and showed a great deal of wilfullness and huge variety in how they replied, often adding opinionated comments.

One of the more interesting results from the survey came when I asked which Chinese ruler people liked best. No one ruler came out on top: even Mao only got about one in 4 or 5 votes. Nor was there any obvious tendency to vote for earlier names on the survey. You may be underestimating the people who answered this survey: they were not sheep.

"I found that college students in China were highly likely to say they disbelieve in God, though this often changed later. Are you really going to assert that atheistic teaching had no effect on that? Or do you think the students were just lying to me?"

I'm going to admit that I'm undecided on this one.

Over the past year I've told my personal story of "how I became an atheist" so many times in various discussion fora, that it seems like I must have told it to everyone by now, but perhaps I never laid it out in detail for you.

Nor is this the place to do it, but suffice it to say that I have come to the conclusion that I didn't become an atheist at all; I was an atheist all along. It was only as I got older and became more educated that I figured out how to articulate my unbelief.

The gist of this is, that I have come to seriously doubt whether someone can make another person believe (or disbelieve) anything which they do not already believe (or disbelieve). That sort of cognitive shift is so fundamental that it can only come "from within" as the Buddhists would say.

Or so it seems to me at this point in my life. So no, I don't think that atheistic teaching has, untimately, that much effect on whether someone believes or not. At most, it provides the tools for articulating an alternative position.

I admit, I could be wrong, but more and more I'm convinced that I'm not. People have been raised from earliest childhood in environments steeped with religious teaching, and nonetheless ended up atheists (I am a case in point). And I personally know of several examples of people raised in non-religious, or even actively anti-religious environments who grew up to be religious believers, eventually.

So really, I don't think your survey tells us much about how or why people became converted. It just furnishes one data point to the effect that some of them have converted.

"If propaganda is as ineffectual as you seem to think,...

Propoganda isn't ineffectual. It demonstrably has the power to change overt behavior, sometimes on a considerable scale. Whether it has the power to change fundamental beliefs is questionable. When the USSR disolved and Russian Orthodox churches began popping up like mushrooms, did all those believers suddenly "convert" from atheism? Or were they believers all along, simply acting like atheists under the old regime?

"...why do you fret so much about the danger of government?"

Government is dangerous; I don't "fret" about that; I recognize it. More to the point, I chafe in the knowledge that government can compel so many of us to act against our own best interests, and frequently for no particularly more noble end.

"You may be underestimating the people who answered this survey: they were not sheep."

No, but they were, presumably, human. And therefore subject to all the vicissitudes of human psychology, and the manipulation thereof.